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Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

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Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#91

Post by dilippkumar »

jchw wrote: post #14

Google is probably screwed without it. Even if ad-tech isn't exactly a bubble, I strongly believe it is overvalued even still. Furthermore, the product that made their name is thoroughly lost. I dread Google Search today. If I found something on Google yesterday, I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow. Google web search strongly favors big websites when somet…

> Furthermore, the product that made their name is thoroughly lost. I dread Google Search today. If I found something on Google yesterday, I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow.

I’ve had pretty good results with kagi.com

YMMV.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#92

Post by Karunamon »

_jab wrote: post #64
smallerfish wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost a meme at this point: > I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall Kagi is, however. Well worth putting your money where your mouth is and supporting them.

Interesting - haven't heard of Kagi before but I looked them up and I can definitely see how a subscription-funded search engine leads to a better incentive structure. But can you provide qualitative examples of how your experience has been better than on Google?

- Result relevance seems on par with Google about five years ago. Very rare that I need to go past page 1.

- Advanced search operators actually work. When you quote something it actually searches for that exact string, when you minus something it actually excludes it.

- Categorization in the search results; for instance all of the low signal listicles can be segregated into their own section.

- Image search that is not intentionally nerfed that will just give you the image directly

- The ability to up and down rank specific sites from your results (something you can't feasibly do without an account anyways); good riddance Pinterest and spammy stack* reposters

- DDG-like bang searches, with the ability to add custom sites

- The obvious one: no ads or tracking or perverse incentives

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#93

Post by itslennysfault »

jliptzin wrote: post #40

I don’t understand arguments that say google will be left in the dust when it comes to AI. There’s no network effects like Facebook, it just takes a lot of money to train the models, which google obviously has. Do we really believe google, with all its resources and engineering talent, has no ability to develop something on par with OpenAI?

They also already have best in class AI. Google's PaLM is a much larger model than GPT3 and even larger than most estimates of GPT4. They also have Imagen which blows the doors off of Dall-e 2. In no way is google behind OpenAI and they have access to WAAAY more training data and resources in general. Google just hasn't shipped a consumer or publicly available product with any of it yet.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#94

Post by ex3xu »

Google in 1998: Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives from the original paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [0]

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers... we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

Google in 2003: Eric "You can trust us with your data" Schmidt convinces Sergey and Larry of the bonkers amount of money they can make by adding a monopoly on digital search advertising to leverage their monopoly on digital search. They proceed to switch to the same advertising business model that hindered their early competitors.

Google in 2008: Buys out Doubleclick to maintain Adsense's monopoly on digital search advertising and doubles down on surveillance capitalism.

Google in 2011: Buys out AdMeld, changes AdX contracts to be even more anticompetitive to maintain monopoly on digital search advertising.

Google in 2017: Loses $2.7 billion antitrust lawsuit in the EU. Response? No changes to business model, but oust a vocal supporter of the decision from Google-funded think tank New America. [1]

Google in 2023: Sued again.

[0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131370

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#95

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

smegger001 wrote: post #81
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what happens when marketing spend goes down (as it does in a recession)? What happens when customers aren't willing to pay as much for your advertising product (as happens in a recession)? What happens when borrowed money can't be secured easily, and debts come due (once again, as happens in a recession)? Typically - what happens is - central banks lower interest rates until they're negative in real yields - an…

that only works if people A) still trust the underlying currency and B) you don't create hyperinflation. What happens in the future when the global economy isn't denominated in petrodollars?

Our government printed 10% of GDP as debt to hand out to people for doing nothing. This is almost the epitome of Monopoly money.

The worst that happened was 10% inflation - which is a FAR cry from hyperinflation.

We had negative real rates for a decade before Covid - and the worst that happened was ~7% home price appreciation.

We're not going to get anything resembling "hyper" unless this country basically becomes another country.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#96

Post by jb1991 »

Why can't Google compete in AI? They have major AI researchers with legendary experience under their belts, what is stopping Google from building something like ChatGPT to augment their search? I guess I don't understand where the threat is. They have a lot more resources than OpenAI.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#97

Post by barbazoo »

randmeerkat wrote: post #42
smallerfish wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost a meme at this point: > I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall Kagi is, however. Well worth putting your money where your mouth is and supporting them.

So, I googled Kagi, found their link… Not only is it required to create an account to use their service, they want a credit card to bill as well! Hard pass.

What would you prefer? Anonymous payments? And regardless of payment method, how would you avoid creating an account to tie the payment to?

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#98

Post by gremlinsinc »

smallerfish wrote: post #26
jchw wrote: post #14

Google is probably screwed without it. Even if ad-tech isn't exactly a bubble, I strongly believe it is overvalued even still. Furthermore, the product that made their name is thoroughly lost. I dread Google Search today. If I found something on Google yesterday, I have no idea if I'll be able to locate it through the sea of blog SPAM and SEO garbage tomorrow. Google web search strongly favors big websites when somet…

Almost a meme at this point: > I am not trying to suggest Duck Duck Go or Bing are actually better overall Kagi is, however. Well worth putting your money where your mouth is and supporting them.

Honestly, It's the same price as copilot, which is imho one of my biggest tools in my coding arsenal currently.

I don't think it should be priced as high. I think they should add other services maybe w/ their own prices, like a photonmail competitor, and api's so people can build things off their tech but pay per query, etc.

I think they could at least have tiers like 100/month 1, 400 searches for $2.99, 1000 for $5.99, unlimited for 8.99. They'd reach a bigger audience, which would likely mean more dollars overall. If I were them, I'd also create a mobile app that's completely free, just to get people hooked on the results while using mobile, or maybe have some privacy-based ads in the app, though the actual search results would have none, and remove that for paid accounts.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#99

Post by Groxx »

titzer wrote: post #9

I'm not so sure AI is as big a threat as Google perceives it to be; back in 2009 the HUGE EXISTENTIAL THREAT was Social, therefore Google+, but that came and went and Google's growth continued unabated. That said, I do see a place for language-model driven search. And I shudder to think that language models will be specifically coerced, bribed, and have ingrained in their brains only what advertisers want. If you tho…

It didn't turn out to be existential, but they absolutely lost the Social "war" and it's costing them billions: Facebook owns a large chunk of all ad revenue now, in no small part because of this.

Not that I'm complaining - the less that's under a mega-conglomerate, the better things tend to be. But it was and is a gigantic failure for Google, possibly their largest ever.

Re: Google is screwed, even if it wins its antitrust case

#100

Post by thewataccount »

crazygringo wrote: post #54

The article doesn't seem to back up its headline at all. Google is under antitrust investigation for ads , while it talks about the threat to the company being AI . The main point of the article is: > It would be a lot easier Google could move fast and break things... But with the full force of the US government bearing down on it, the search giant can’t do that now... Google will need to conduct itself slowly and te…

One of the potential issues a lot of people are speculating about is the lower impression counts. For example - when trying to write a script using some api's I'm not super familiar with, I might do 6+ google searches. This will be similar for a lot of fields when trying to find an answer to something, news, other research, etc.

That means you're loading a fresh page of ads every search AND all the ads on those sites too.

With chatGPT (And I'm aware Google has something similar) - I can (and have) just asked it a question, and it will answer/write entire scripts for me. That means there's only a single page load.

Basically people are speculating Google may struggle to monetize a chatbot to the extent they can monetize every single search + site load. You certainly _can_ the speculation is whether the drastically lower impression counts will impact their overall profitability.

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